This is one of the challenges I face with my Poker Robot.

Surprisingly the hardest part of programming a poker bot, is making one that's not just hard to detect but difficult to figure out. In higher limit rooms the good players will very quickly clock your strategy, and if they realize its a bot, and therefore rigid, they'll take you to the cleaners.

Currently I use a ratchet effect, alternating between several algorithms, some of which are designed specifically to lose, but to lose in creative, sensible ways.

"Run a simple web spider"
A spider that is somehow able to crawl the entire internet, primarily the bits that people have tried very hard hide from spiders, all with only a "few hundred megs" to play with.

"checks availability but never actually pulls content"
And how pray does one do that? Guess work? Intuition? Magic?

"Run the same spider in any non-censoring country."
Of course taking into account the myriad of factors that would generate false positives, like differences in latency and the fact by the time you've got to scan number two, the first set of results are now weeks out of date (conservative estmiate, you're crawling THE INTERNET)

No. Just, no.

...genius code is not that hard.

It's very easy to use your own style for eveything and reimplement every existing toolset because "you know best". You can heavily over-engineer every library you write. You could do something outlandish like creating a custom scriping language for you business logic. Academically clever it may be, but it's totally wasted in any production environment.

What's hard is writing good, clean, concise (yet not obfuscated) code. It must well structured and sensibly designed. Not just so that you can maintain it, but that everybody can. The kind of code that'll convince subsequent devs follow YOUR example, rather than come up with their very own individual "clever" style and fuck it up for the next generation.

"Genius" code isn't that clever. Genius devs write code that that even the least talented there can comprehend.

mod parent up. all true.

"To you maybe, but you are forgetting that most people don't get the concept of strings, let alone know how to analyze such a thing."

Did you forget where you are? This is Slashdot! I fully expect each and every one of you to have at some point written your own disassembler, and currently own at least one t-shirt that detects Wifi APs!

Mod parent up. Couldn't have said it better...

FUD at it's best! This is what you get when your primary news source is 4chan.

The file is rather obviously (look at the strings/modules) a small update to the Symantec PIF Alert Engine. See PIFSvc.exe and PifEng.dll (which have been there for a while) for more information. From what I can tell, and I'm not a Symantec user, this is the part of the LiveUpdate componant, even if it wasn't binary analysis shows nothing untoward.

The real WTF is why are Norton deleting supports requests en-masse rather than simply sending out a press release.

A good question. You want to start a Cable ISP? You have two options.

1) Approach Virgin media, the cable Monopoly. They are in pretty much exactly the same position as BT, but with Cable. They own the entire infrastructure, so either become a reseller or see option 2)

2) Put down the cable yourself. This will cost a few hundred million pounds to get anywhere near the coverage you will need to be competitive. So unless you have a stupid amount of capital to throw at what is really a hit or miss plan, then I don't recommend it.

Virgin Media also backed Phorm 100%. And why not? it's a real money maker and most customers won't know or care.

They've been forced to allow LLU, which breaks the monopoly somewhat, and they're also compelled to offer competitive prices with their Wholesale packages.

However, cable companies aside (who are only available in specific areas), BT still own the entire infrastructure, and while they may be complying with the Anti-Trust ruling, they'll still do everything in their power to maintain their dominance.

You try and start an ISP in the UK, and let me know how far you get without BT's involvement.

You mean a company like Phorm , who have been getting backing from both BT (THE telco out here) and the Gov't despite the exclusively bad press?

It's just a very stylish and aesthetically pleasing form of population control.

Like a really glamorous Eugenics...

Sean Hannity?!? Is that you????

I had never seen this show before. Now that I have, I consider the last 20 years of ignorance a blessing. The script reads like a 13 year old wrote it.

Awful.

Ah! So finally I can buy that yacht I always wanted...

I am a business customer of Google's. We use their apps and e-mail package.

"99.9% Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Talk uptime SLA"

The service was down for over 45 minutes, how do you think google will react to a refund request? I'm probably not going to make one, but do you think many people are? Has anybody here? How did it go?